Hanover

Chapter One

It has always been my contention that there was nothing better in this world than a good marriage, and nothing worse than a bad one. It is a celestial cathedral for the washed and the unwashed, the inspired and the uninspired. It is a refuge to the hopeless. Somehow, though, that was not enough to suffice my parents. As far as my family went, the gods above must have smiled in mirth as they witnessed the dehiscence of my parent’s marriage, for it crumbled in its very essence. In the beginning it was just too perfect, and perfection was the bailiwick of the provident. Whether it was due to the gods or not, but after a year of two, it slowly disintegrated. My father was a tall man with rugged good looks, facile charm, and a fast way with the ladies; while my mother was a true lady. with a winsome face, a pert body, a mind that had little time for fools. For the first few years, their marriage was as warm and inviting as the fireplace when the house was enveloped by a winter storm. There might be snow on the ground, but inside there was a fire exhausting itself in the fireplace. Like some living thing, this blaze inhaled and exhaled, grew and gave way. Perhaps, just perhaps, it was the very combustion in its raging heat, consumed itself. Looking back on it, it was almost entirely my father’s fault, for it was his inherent imperfections that drove them apart. I blame him no less now, then a I did when I was in my parochial junior high school. In the early years of their marriage, they looked like a content, complacent couple out of a Norman Rockwell painting. The blaze, though, was dying in its own conflagration. That is just my supposition. But I truly doubt that it didn’t cross some other people’s minds.

My father’s father was the shop keeper at a small haberdashery in Denver and he wanted better for his son. Pulling connections, he got him a job as a teller in at First United Bank. Conscientious and polite and competent to all his clients, my father came into the favor of the immediate manager at the bank. In no undue time my father was promoted to a loan manager. His talent at this position continued much as it had at his previous position. He managed to thrive in his position for three or four years. Finally, at the behest of his employers at the bank, my father moved from Denver to Riverton to be groomed as a bank manager in the small town at the western lip of the Rocky Mountains, where they had just established a bank. That’s where he met my mother, who fitted proper women into their proper finery in Mr. Bond’s Dress Shop at the Fourth Avenue and Main Street, an avenue in which it seemed Mr. Julius Bond had a finger in every pie. Her people were forbearers in the valley and had been farming corn and other crops near Fruita since the Grand Valley opened to venturers. But the valley was arid, the valley was barren and white, with alkaline patches of caliche, looking like the burns of dog urine dotting a green lawn, did all but defeat these sodbusters. The land was good for little else, though, so the farmers ran cattle and sheep and chickens on the side. In time, the hamlet became a village, and the village became a small town. By the nineteen fifties, the valley walled in twenty or thirty thousand souls. Labouring in every profession or calling, they formed the largest collections of beings between Denver and Salt Lake City.

The Beresfords went back at least two generations in the Grand Valley. They were among the sodbusters who battled the caliche and the pestilence of their crops in outside of Fruita, a village in the lower part of the valley. Rebecca Beresford left my mother, and sister, two brothers, and left the farm vowing she’d never again strain her back tending corn or hay, chasing pigs or culling the chickens. Farm life was never going to be her vocation. Instead, she decided she was more cut out to work in the teaching profession. As soon as she finished high school she obtained her teaching degree. Her first posting as a teacher was in Windsor, just outside Fort Collins. Teaching English to junior high students, while at the same time introducing her wards into the world of Pythagoras and Euclid, she found her profession both challenging and fulfilling. Weary of the Front Range, tired of being separated from her relatives, she wrote the principal of Riverton High School a letter. Fortune must have been looking down on her when she sent the letter for as it turned out, they had a sudden vacancy in the math department there. Rebecca Richards was to remain there for thirty years teaching the foundations of arithmetic, geometry, and differential equations to those from sophomores to seniors at Riverton High School and the intricacies of English to younger students. Though she would have preferred teaching younger students mathematics, she didn’t mind teaching the older students. Mother seemed to find an almost religious faith in the implacable theorems of mathematics. Passing these on to her students, she found the highest fulfilment.

Returning to the Grand Valley, my mother met my father when she opened a checking and saving accounts at First United Bank. Professionally, as a bank manager, my father could be nauseatingly unctuous to his clients. Rebecca, in her later years, thought my father rather abrupt and too quick to take liberties with people whom he barely knew. This was particularly the case when the customer was a woman. Taking her application, he proposed something of her: he asked her out to dinner. Like a proper woman back in the forties, she didn’t accede to his initial overtures. But my father, who was not the canniest of men, persisted. Finally, after numerous denials, she accepted his invitation to dinner. That first meal was at Pantuso’s Italian Restaurant, one of the few eating establishments in the valley at the time. Theirs was a whirlwind romance and within four months they were married at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. In those early days of the marriage, my father seldom drank more than a beer or two, usually turning down any offers of hard liquor. Then, as in succeeding years, my parents lived in a two story house on the corner of Eighth Street and Main Street. Until I reached my majority, and went of to college, it remained my home. There was a wooden, white-washed porch with a roof wrapped around the house. From the house, my father could walk to work at Fourth Street and Main, where the bank was located. My mother, though, drove the Ford family LTD station wagon back and forth to her classes to the new high school, a good three or four miles from our house. There, mother took a teaching post to inculcate the mysteries of mathematics in the careless and thoughtless minds who were only in her class to get their high school degree. During the day, while my parents toiled away at their respective jobs. The budding town, was spilling out to the north, and what had been simply marshes became a large brick building that became Riverton High School.

For the first few years of marriage, things went well for John and Rebecca Richards: there were no silent resentments; there were no major fights; there was no simmering smoke to signal a major engagement. Within a few years of taking her vows with my father, Claire had me. She took to motherhood with all the enthusiasm she had brought to her profession of instilling mathematical knowledge and English language skills to those of her docents. Evidently my father was conceited; evidently he was obsessed with keeping the blood line going. Thus, he bestowed his name upon me: John Richards, Jr. It’s a name I’ve been bridled with to this day, for better or for worse. Those who know me well know that I prefer to be called Jack. Scarcely a year passed before I was succeeded by a brother. My parents named him Brent. I daresay where the name came from for there were no for there was no Brent on either the Richard’s or the Beresford’s lineage. Perhaps it was from the Bible; perhaps it was from an old Celtic fairy tale. Wherever it came from, it wasn’t an auspicious appellation for my brother seemed to have been born under a bad star. Although my brother inherited my father’s looks and charm, he had not inherited my mother’s common sense or keen intelligence.

It was when Brent was a year or two old, and still in nappies, that the Troubles began in the family. At work (as I was to learn later), my father’s eyes began to wander. But the wandering eyes did not stop at that stage. My father’s form of indenture became philandering. Hardly did it matter if the women were chaste or unchaste, married or unmarried. He seemed to have no decency when it came to such small matters. As he became a philanderer, his thirst for alcohol at first lagged behind his thirst for women. This tom-catting would lead to a several short-lived affairs that my mother would quickly put an end to, each and every time, threatening to leave my father. Darkness descended upon my father at these times. Dark was the world he created; dark was the world he wallowed in. To deal with this darkness, I think, he drank. In this world of darkness, I think the alcohol chased away the ghosts that inhabited his realm. Most often it was Johnny Walker Red Label he drank. He’d sit in his recliner in the living room and drink his shots of Johnny Walker with